


a room that laughter once made proud

by TolkienGirl



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Avengers Compound, F/M, Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), based on a poem called Lonely Is Just One Word so of course it's angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-06 22:16:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14657324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: He is always so sure he has lost everything. He is always wrong.





	a room that laughter once made proud

_—one word chosen to represent so much—_

Vision remains, when almost all the rest are gone. He glides through the empty shadows, busies himself about the echoing kitchen. Speaks when spoken to, the works.

Tony would like to think of it as loyalty, but then again, Vision bears the unmarred fingerprint of J.A.R.V.I.S., whose affection was preprogrammed and permanent.

Tony thinks of it as loyalty anyway.

(He believed it of J.A.R.V.I.S., too).

_—in echoed footsteps of a departing friend—_

He has never been able to hide behind square-jawed purpose or unshakeable sincerity. They are not, after all, the virtues of those who hide.

Steve said, _he’s my friend_ , because he believed it, and Tony said, _so was I_ , because he had to.

Because that is always the sort of thing that comes to light, when there is nowhere left to hide.

_—in the silence of sorrows too deep to speak—_

Tony stands in the long hallway, in the room of mirrors, in the center of his Babel. A tower could reach to the skies; a compound like this, with so many empty rooms, reaches for something else.

He is always so sure he has lost everything; he is always wrong.

_—stays and torments until new Love shatters it apart—_

Pepper finds him. Pepper, who left him when things were far from good, won’t stay away when they’re worse than ever. Her sole weakness looks very much like him. “You don’t have to tell me what happened.”

She is warmth in this cold place. Only, Tony never meant it to be cold.

He meant it to be a home. Pepper stands stiffly, like a stranger, reminding him that it isn’t.

“I lost them,” Tony says. And once he might have meant his parents, or the suits and the tech that made them, or the countless unnamed dead. But today he means the only people he ever thought were really very much like him.  

“You should come with me,” Pepper says. “Stay at my place for a few days.”

It may well be pity in her voice, but he follows it anyway.


End file.
